


At the End of the Line (Decisions, Decisions)

by jazzjo



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2014-12-27
Packaged: 2018-03-03 20:30:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2886530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzjo/pseuds/jazzjo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>GH-325 had done its rounds in the playground that it had made it Phil's mind. There was nothing that they could do, and even Melinda had to admit that there was no way he was going to get better. </p>
<p>He begged, and she relented.</p>
<p>It was the merciful thing to do, to put him out of his misery since they were not going to find a cure in the time that he could hold on. She would rebuild the agency from the ground up, and he was gone. </p>
<p>Done in reply to tumblr user bobbimrs's post.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At the End of the Line (Decisions, Decisions)

He hadn’t been himself for a while now. 

 

Between the ever increasingly frequent carving sessions, as well as the drain that they put on his body, and the stress of putting their entire organisation together again from the ground up, he was unravelling. Had been since he had seen Garrett’s carvings for the first time. 

 

For all that her plans and her staunch determination had been worth, there was little she could do now. 

 

Every day she spent searching for answers. While the team rallied together and tried their best, only Skye and her really knew the significance of their wild goose chase. 

 

Skye did not even know the entirety of the consequences if they were to fail. 

 

Every night, Melinda stood behind him as he carved fervently, the sound of a knife scratching and dragging through drywall the only thing filling the air apart from the occasional click of her camera’s shutter. 

 

During the day she knew he carved and wrote on every surface his hands could find as his mind pushed him and tortured him until it could release its new piece of the puzzle. Sometimes it ended up in his flesh, mottling and bloodying the pale surface, often requiring her to stitch it up or to bandage large wounds as surreptitiously as she could in the relative privacy of his office. 

 

When the knife fell from his quaking hand in the wee hours of every morning, she would rush over to catch him before his frame crashed to the ground, setting him on his bed and cleaning up once he had fallen asleep. 

 

Through what was left of their off-duty hours she would sit by his bedside, another one of Peggy Carter’s old S.S.R. files in her hands as she watched him, wrenching him out of his slumber when his screams became loud enough to be audible outside of his soundproofed room or when he had tensed so much that seizures took over his entire frame. 

 

More than once, pulling him from his terror and nightmares had resulted in a nasty contusion or two, with the occasional dislocated joint and, on one occasion, a broken rib. She never said a word. 

 

Still he slept, and she did not. 

 

Even so, if was becoming glaringly obvious that he was falling apart. He could no longer hold a pen without the symbols materialising, leaving his paperwork undone and another weight on her plate that she found she could live with, if she had to. Almost every night he was tearing his own brain apart trying to find answers in inane circles and lines that he did not understand. 

 

The team had not spoken to him — any one of them, even Skye — for the better part of two months without having their heads ripped off or receiving nothing but a blank, listless look in response. 

 

He had tried to kill her, one night. Whatever was inside of his brain had told him that she was a threat to his quest to find answers, and something in his kind eyes changed as he held her against the wall with both hands around her neck. 

 

The percussive banging of his head on whatever available surface there was had become commonplace, and it was at a point that she could no longer trust him with himself or with the team, lest danger be posed to either of them. 

 

He had begged, just as he did when he had still been lucid, for her to end this all for him. Placed his own service weapon in her hand and told her to shoot him where he stood in the dark of the shadow that the drywall cast. Five seventeen a.m., the sun just rising behind her, reflected in his eyes. 

 

She had to admit, Melinda resigned herself to the fact, it would be more merciful to end this for him. They were not getting any closer to any answers that would diminish the pain that he was in. At this rate, he would sooner destroy himself or the entirety of their team and organisation than recover. 

 

He was not getting better, and that was a fact. 

 

But even so, staring into his pained eyes, she remembered too many faces of her past, eyes blank and lifeless as they stared at her.

 

_Her father, slumped over his desk in his study, eyes stretched open. She had not been able to get that image of him staring straight through her out of her mind for a good few years after that. Eight and three quarters years old, pushing the heavy door of the study open once she had come home to an entirely quiet house. Her mother had been out — somewhere far away, somewhere classified — on a mission and her father was meant to watch her. She had tripped over a handgun as she rushed to his side, lying just beneath his left hand._

 

He begged her, the pleas ricocheting through her mind, growing ever louder in the seemingly hollow expanse. 

 

_Haniya, the civilian girl in Bahrain, cradled in her arms and weeping silently, calling out for her parents, for a higher being, for help, for anything. She had held Haniya until her bronze eyes had turned to brown, darkened and dimmed as the lights went out in them. All around them dead bodies lay, two of them out of the several dozen her fallen comrades, but the only one she had to watch and comfort, who had not signed up and made and oath to die in the line of fire, was in her arms._

 

Melinda’s finger found the trigger, her mind finding more memories as her finger stalled in its movement. 

 

_Phil’s eyes, in the security feed that she had pleaded Fury not to show her. Him bleeding out and still joking around, his eyes fading from their already light blue to a milky bluish blank._

 

“Just do it, Mel,” He forced out, each word causing his chest to heave and his brow to wrinkle.

 

She forced the tears back where they had come from, refusing to let them spill down her cheeks as she stared down the man she had once faced at the altar, the agent who she had trusted to watch her back countless times in the field. The person she was meant to be protecting at all costs. 

 

She wanted to scream. To ask him if he honestly thought this was easy for her to do. To beg him to stay, to hold on just a while longer. 

 

But that would be cruel of her, and Melinda May was many things, but cruel was not one of them. 

 

So the trigger was pulled, and the team came rushing in once she sent a message to Skye. She cleaned him up before they entered, wiping away the days and nights of exhaustion and the blood from the carvings in his skin.

 

A clean shot through his head. A guaranteed kill shot. Dead on contact. No pain. None.

 

For him. 

 

He had already suffered enough. It was the least she could do. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

He had told her, once in a conversation a long, long time ago. A lifetime ago, before they had both taken their worst beatings. He had told her that if she were to outlive him, that he would never want to be buried as a body. 

 

They had him burned to ashes, dressed in his favourite — not finest — suit, and the first tie that his mother had given him when he first headed off to S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy. Those ashes went into a sealed titanium canister, buried in the plot where his coffin would be, in front of a headstone that read plainly words that could never fully encapsulate the man that he had been. 

 

_Phillip Julian Coulson_

_8th July 1964 — 9th November 2014_

_Courage, Honour, Loyalty, Sacrifice. You are braver than you think._

 

The funeral was not military. There was no brass band, nor a twenty one gun salute. What little was left of their organisation turned up, fatherless now that their leader was gone. And orphan organisation mourning its fallen director. There was no flag, for which she was thankful. 

 

After all, he had no family left, and they would have given it to her, for the fact that they had never finalised their divorce. 

 

She did not think she could handle that. 

 

What she did have to do was install his name on the Wall of Valour. 

 

What had been handed to her was the toolbox that Fury had once presented to Coulson. Maria had entered their base and his office without setting off any alarms, and no one had entered his office since he had passed. She had helped Melinda put together the documents that were most important at that point, to continue where Coulson had left off in his mission to build S.H.I.E.L.D. back up from its ashes. 

 

His ashes, now, too. 

 

Melinda had dragged herself to her former S.O.’s bedside, asking advice from the first female director that S.H.I.E.L.D. had ever had on how to restore her life’s work. 

 

And how to move on from the deaths of men who had given too much for their own convictions. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

With each new ally, Melinda put the pieces of the fractured organisation back together, in the name of Phil Coulson. The best of the best helped her, the team working day after day to make S.H.I.E.L.D. what it once had been. It took time. It took a damn lot of time, but by the time that Director Melinda May had handed the reins over to Skye the organisation was back on its feet. 

 

They were known to the world. Respected for what they did after they had time and time again proved that they were not what the people needed to fear. Tearing Hydra apart certainly had helped, in that respect. 

 

Along the way they had lost more people. Each one was mourned, given a military funeral with full honours where possible, their names adorning the Wall of Valour. 

 

But they had found people as well. Lost people like Romanoff once was, orphans like Skye had been, second chances and first chances alike being given as they proved themselves enough to be taken in. Each recruit put through the restored S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy had their badges pinned on by the director, shaking her hand and getting a curt nod of approval. 

 

She had been forced to the end of the line, a gun in her hand and a damn hard decision to make. 

 

She had made it, for him. But she had rebuilt all of this, for all of them, and for herself. For all the people that she had lost over the years, some of her decisions had saved people, and had found people. When she finally handed the reins over, Melinda had found peace in the decisions that she had been forced to make. 


End file.
